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The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya

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The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya Compilation © 2014 Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal Association THE SLOW-BURNING GENOCIDE OF MYANMAR’S ROHINGYA Maung Zarni† and Alice Cowley† Abstract: Since 1978, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority of Western Burma, have been subject to a state-sponsored process of destruction. The Rohingya have deep historical roots in the borderlands of Rakhine State, Myanmar, and were recognized officially both as citizens and as an ethnic group by three successive governments of post-independence Burma. In 1978, General Ne Win’s socialist military dictatorship launched the first large-scale campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State with the intent first of expelling them en masse from Western Burma and subsequently legalizing the systematic erasure of Rohingya group identity and legitimizing their physical destruction. This on-going process has continued to the present day under the civilian-military rule of President Thein Sein’s government. Since 2012, the Rohingya have been subject to renewed waves of hate campaigns and accompanying violence, killings and ostracization that aim both to destroy the Rohingya and to permanently remove them from their ancestral homes in Rakhine State. Findings from the authors’ three-year research on the plight of the Rohingya lead us to conclude that Rohingya have been subject to a process of slow-burning genocide over the past thirty-five years. The destruction of the Rohingya is carried out both by civilian populations backed by the state and perpetrated directly by state actors and state institutions. Both the State in Burma and the local community have committed four out of five acts of genocide as spelled out by the 1948 Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. Despite growing evidence of genocide, the international community has so far avoided calling this large scale human suffering genocide because no powerful member states of the UN Security Council have any appetite to forego their commercial and strategic interests in Burma to address the slow-burning Rohingya genocide. † An International Judge, People’s Tribunal on Sri Lanka, Germany (2013); Fellow, Center of Democracy and Elections, the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur; and Visiting Fellow (2013-15), Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics, Zarni was born, lived and university-educated in Mandalay, Burma, from 1963—1988. He never met a single Rohingya throughout the course of his life in Burma. Further as an indication of the effectiveness of the anti- Rohingya policies and propaganda adopted by successive Myanmar military governments he had not even heard of the word Rohingya while living in the country. He was introduced to the issue of Rohingya persecution by his colleague Alice Cowley only about 4 years ago, and came to accept the Rohingya as one of his own fellow Myanmar peoples based on the strength of the empirical evidence. Outraged by the level of atrocities committed against the Rohingya in the name of Myanmar people and religion, he has been using his scholarship in order to quell myths and rumors detrimental to the Rohingya well-being. Zarni holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and MA from the University of California at Davis. † Consultant Researcher, Equal Rights Trust (ERT), London. Alice Cowley, BA First Class (School of Oriental and African Studies or SOAS) and MA with distinction (Institute of Education), both at the University of London, has worked with various refugees from Myanmar since 2000. In the early 2000’s, she lived and worked as a teacher in a Karenni refugee camp along the Thai-Burmese border and became aware of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya and the anti-Rohingya ethnic nationalism among the Rakhine political refugees. No sooner had she joined the ERT’s Statelessness and Nationality Project in 2009 than she began researching about the persecution of the Rohingya. Both researchers have since worked with Rohingya refugees in various capacities and at different levels of the Rohingya issues in London, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. 682 PACIFIC RIM LAW & POLICY JOURNAL VOL. 23 NO. 3 I. INTRODUCTION “What can we do, Brother, they (the Rohingya) are too many? We can’t kill them all.” Ex-Brigadier General, formerly stationed in Arakan or Rakhine State, and Ambassador to Brunei, Fall, 2012.1 “How can it be ethnic cleansing? They are not an ethnic group.” Mr. Win Myaing, the official spokesperson of the Rakhine State Government, May 15, 2013.2 “We do not have the term ‘Rohingya.’” Myanmar President Thein Sein, Chatham House, London, July 17, 2013.3 “There are elements of genocide in Rakhine with respect to Rohingya . The possibility of a genocide needs to be discussed. I myself do not use the term genocide for strategic reasons.” Tomás Ojéa Quintana, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, London Conference on Decades of State-Sponsored Destruction of Myanmar’s Rohingya, April 28, 2014.4 Over the past thirty-five years, the State in Myanmar has intentionally formulated, pursued, and executed national and state-level plans aimed at destroying the Rohingya people in Western Myanmar. 5 This destruction has been state-sponsored, legalized, and initiated by a frontal assault on the identity, culture, social foundation, and history of the Rohingya who are a people with a distinct ethnic culture. They are a borderland people whose ancestral roots and cultural ties lie along the post- colonial borders of today’s Myanmar, a former British colony until its 1 Interview with Thet Oo Maung, Ex-Brigadier Gen. and Ambassador to Brunei, in Brunei (Aug. 2012). 2 Jason Szep, Special Report - In Myanmar, Apartheid Tactics Against Minority Muslims, REUTERS, May 15, 2013, http://mobile.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBRE94E00020130515?i=3& irpc=932. Mr Win Myaing is a Buddhist Rakhine official spokesperson of Rakhine State Government. Id. 3 Mark Inkey, Thein Sein Talks at Chatham House, NEW MANDALA, July 17, 2013, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2013/07/17/thein-sein-talks-at-chatham-house/. 4 Maung Zarni, Press Release: United Nations Expert Says There Are “Elements of Genocide” Against Myanmar’s Rohingya, ZARNI’S BLOG (Apr. 28, 2014), http://www.maungzarni.net/2014/04/ press-release-united-nations-expert.html#sthash.AFAEnbbr.dpuf (last visited May 24, 2014). 5 David Mepham, Dispatches: Burma – “Excuse Me, Mr. President . .”, HUM. RTS. WATCH, July 19, 2013, http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/19/excuse-me-mr-president. JUNE 2014 THE SLOW-BURNING GENOCIDE OF MYANMAR’S ROHINGYA 683 independence in 1948, and Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, which gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971. Their identity as an ethno- linguistic group was recognized under successive Burmese regimes after independence in 1948 and was systematically erased by the increasingly anti-Muslim military-controlled governments since 1962.6 In Myanmar’s state media, official policy documents, and school textbooks, the Rohingya are referred to as Bengali, a racist local reference, and are portrayed as illegal economic migrants from the colonial time, who are a ‘threat to national security, a portrayal that the bulk of the Burmese have accepted as a fact over the past five decades. In contrast, the international community continues to recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group.7 The State and the predominantly Buddhist society have collaborated with the intent to de- indigenize, illegalize, dehumanize, and destroy a people whose ancestral home is in Myanmar. The evidence of the intent to destroy the Rohingya people over the past thirty-five years through assaults on their identity, killings during multiple pogroms, physical and mental harm, deliberate infliction of conditions of life designed to bring about the group’s destruction, and measures to prevent births, lead the authors to conclude that Myanmar’s Rohingya are the victims of genocide carried out jointly by the central political state and anti-Muslim ultra-nationalists among the Buddhist Rakhine peoples. Rohingya is an ethno-religious term meaning Muslim people whose ancestral home is Arakan or Rakhine in Myanmar.8 To date, the total number of Rohingya in Rakhine State are estimated at over one million, the majority of whom live in three townships of North Rakhine State, and 6 For an on-line selection of fully authenticated ID cards and other proofs of the Rohingya existence, identity and citizenship in Burma or Myanmar, see Maung Zarni, The Official Evidence of the Rohingya Ethnic ID and Citizenship which the Burmese Ethno- and Genocidists Don’t Want You to See, ZARNI’S BLOG, http://www.maungzarni.net/2012/08/the-official-evidence-of-rohingya.html. 7 For instance, international visitors to the country—including the veteran anti-apartheid campaigner of South Africa Desmond Tutu, U.S. President Barack Obama, Britain’s Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow and so on—have all referred to the Rohingya as “Rohingya.” As a matter of fact, in his public lecture at Rangoon University on August 1, 2012, MP John Bercow stated emphatically that to call the Rohingya “Bengali” is mentally “hurtful” to the Rohingya and amounts to “racism.” For Bercow’s lecture see Shwe Maung, Q&A-Speaker of The House of Commons in Yangon, YOUTUBE (Aug. 2, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUNI_ngFAqI. For the transcript of President Obama’s speech at Rangoon University, see Barack Obama, U.S. President, Remarks by President Obama at the University of Yangon (Nov. 19, 2012), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/2012/11/19/remarks-president-obama-university-yangon. 8 Michael W. Charney, Buddhism in Arakan: Theories and Historiography of the Religious Basis of Ethnonyms, KALABAN PRESS NETWORK, July 8, 2007, http://www.kaladanpress.org/index.php/ scholar-column-mainmenu-36/58-arakan-historical-seminar/718-buddhism-in-arakantheories-and- historiography-of-the-religious-basis-of-ethnonyms.
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